Academic Planning: Provost's report calls for reorganizing arts & sciences, making master's 'target' degree

The long-awaited report also sets as a goal raising the quality of doctoral programs in the arts and sciences and professional disciplines over the next decade so that at least one quarter are rated in the top quartile-and almost all in the top half-of programs in the country. At the same time, it recommends reducing the size of the doctoral programs in most areas.

"We've got to change the way in which we're doing things and we have the capability to make this a better university within the resource envelope that we see available to us," said Headrick. "We're talking about some fairly significant changes."

The report, which Headrick stressed is a work in progress and is not yet the academic plan, will be released tomorrow to deans, department chairs, and the Faculty Senate and Professional Staff Senate executive committees, among others. It will be posted next week in its entirety-including an appendix that details proposed changes on a department-by-department basis-on UBWings. The address is: http://wings.buffalo.edu/provost/AcademicReport/. The narrative section will be published as an insert in next week's issue of the Reporter.

Headrick said that once his report is available to the university community, he and President William R. Greiner will be speaking with various campus constituencies and gathering input from them to help in preparing the final planning document.

He hopes to have that document by June. It would be implemented over several years.

In an interview with the Reporter, Headrick gave numerous examples of the changes-both administrative and philosophical-that he said the university will have to undergo in order to achieve its goal of becoming the premier public research university in the Northeast, on a par with such mid-sized AAU institutions as Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa.

For instance, he said, there will have to be much more coordination among areas that now are split among several units and schools. The biological sciences, as an example, are split into four or five units in different schools, he said. As part of the proposed plan, those units would come together "on a forward plan that links their aspirations and capabilities together." While those individual units would not necessarily be merged into one larger unit, they would begin cooperating in ways they have not in the past, such as in making decisions about planning, appointments, tenure and promotion.

"That's a very significant change," he said.

Headrick noted that undergraduate education is an extremely important focus for UB.

"Some people have wanted to argue that this is primarily a graduate research institution; it's not," he stressed. "It's an undergraduate and graduate research institution. And we've got to do all that entails and we've got to do it well."

While some individual departments and schools have done an excellent job at undergraduate education, the institution as a whole needs to focus more on undergraduate education than it has in the past, he said. "Those changes will be reasonably significant for a lot of people."

The report does not focus on cutting programs because "there isn't much that we do that we can simply drop," Headrick said.

But it does "change the emphasis," he said, in terms of the focus on undergraduates and encouraging more students and faculty to concentrate on graduate education, particularly at the master's level. It also changes the focus on doctoral programs, with many programs reducing the number of students pursuing degrees, while attracting higher-quality students and giving them better support in their programs.

Acknowledging that there has been a lot of apprehension in the university community about the forthcoming report on academic planning, Headrick said he would not describe the proposed changes as "ominous."

"They're indicative of what we have to do to position this university to be a major research university in the 21st century," he said. "But they will change a lot of what we do and how we do it."

Among the major changes outlined in the report:

· A reorganization of the arts and sciences.
Headrick has proposed two options. One would merge the faculties of Arts and Letters, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences and Mathematics into a College of Arts and Sciences. The other would merge Arts and Letters and Social Sciences into a College of Arts, Humanities and Social Science while merging Natural Sciences and Mathematics and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences into a College of Science and Engineering.

Although the report does not favor either option, "the status quo is not an option," it says. Headrick said he will appoint a panel to gather information on the options to help in making a final decision.

The reorganization is necessary, he said, because the current division of the humanities into two faculties with two different decision-making structures has not "developed a strong sense of the importance of the humanities and humanistic studies on this campus."

And by splitting the arts and sciences into three separate faculties and decision-making structures, "UB has probably helped to advance graduate education (in those areas), but also hindered the full development of undergraduate education in those areas."

· The creation of interdisciplinary institutes, initiatives and centers.
Institutes, which would have relatively large memberships, would bring together faculty with related and common interests. They would require minimal administrative support to run conferences, internal colloquia and ensure good internal and external communication. Initiatives have an academic focus for collaboration that as of yet has no formal structure. Initiatives could, in time, evolve into institutes.

Among the proposals for institutes and initiatives that are under discussion are those to establish a humanities initiative and institute, a policy institute, a biological sciences initiative, chemical sciences initiative, information and communication technology initiative, urban initiative, women and gender institute, environmental institute and a neuroscience initiative.

Within the institutes would be located a number of research centers and interdisciplinary program centers. These centers would be operating units of faculty and students working together in a well-defined area of academic and intellectual endeavor. They would foster collaborations and joint work in research, scholarly writing and teaching. Some centers might act as departments, and some will be involved, along with departments and schools, in appointment and promotion recommendations.

Schools, departments and faculties would continue to have the major, but not exclusive, responsibility for establishing and maintaining degree programs, setting requirements and standards, monitoring and evaluating students, and teaching.

· Making the master's degree the "target" degree.
During the past 50 years, the baccalaureate degree has became the standard expectation for a well-educated, well-trained work force, the report says. But as the nation moves into the 21st century, its work force will require broader and higher levels of competence. "The bachelor's degree will not have the same significance that it has had in the last part of this century," Headrick said.

In making the master's degree the "target" degree for students entering the university as freshmen or transfers, UB is "trying to stake out a place for us in higher education and in SUNY; it would give us a very distinctive cast," Headrick said.

A UB education would be seen as something more than a four-year experience, with the bachelor's degree becoming a step toward the target goal of the master's degree, he said. Not every student would pursue a master's degree, he said. While about 25 percent of the university's graduate students have an undergraduate degree from UB, Headrick would like to see that number increase to 50 percent.

"Students may continue on in their major field, move from one field to another or move from an arts and sciences basic undergraduate program into a professional program," he said. "We can make that easier, so the students don't have to finish their undergraduate degree and then think about where they're going to go and what they're going to do.

"I think that will change the character of this institution."

The report projects a restructuring of the "enrollment mix" over a five-year period "in ways that are compatible with other aspects of the (academic) plan," Headrick said.

"With the current SUNY targets, UB will be expected to maintain its enrollment at about 24,000 students," the report says. "Gradually over the five-year period, the plan then would be for undergraduate freshman enrollment to decline to 2,200 and overall retention to be improved. Transfer students would increase by 28 percent so that overall undergraduate enrollment can be stabilized at 16,000.

"Graduate enrollment would be stabilized at 8,000," the report says. "The number of Ph.D. students would gradually decline. First professional degree enrollments would remain stable, and master's-level enrollment would increase."

· Improve the quality of doctoral programs.
To get to the level of the institutions that it aspires to, such as Virginia, North Carolina and Iowa, UB has to bring more of its programs up to the top quartile of the National Research Council rankings, Headrick said. "But not all of them," he said. "I think it's unrealistic to think we're going to get all of them up there." So the goal is to get a quarter of UB programs in the top quartile and virtually all of the programs in the top half of the rankings, he said.

"That will take some stretching for us over the next decade," he admitted, noting that while UB has some programs in the top quartile, it also has some in the third and fourth quartiles.

"I lean toward investing in our strengths and making them better and trying to do the best we can with the ones that are weak to improve them," he said. "But in making the choices and tradeoffs, I would lean toward making our strengths much better rather than trying to bring everybody up to some minimum level."

Headrick said that some doctoral programs are likely to be consolidated-since in many areas higher education is producing too many Ph.D.s for the number of jobs available in academia-or restructured so that graduates can pursue careers other than those in academia.

Reducing the size of doctoral programs can be done without hurting the quality of the programs, he said. The lower end of the doctoral admissions at UB are not very high-caliber, he said. "If we lost them, we would not be losing many really good students who are likely to make a significant mark in academia or other areas," he added. "So we might as well concentrate our resources on students who will make a difference."